How to Get the Most Value Out of Your Guest Posting Campaigns

Guest posting can go a long way and have many benefits, including getting more exposure and better personal and company brand recognition.

Publishing guest blog posts is a great way to get your content out across the web, while also cross-promoting it in a variety of different ways to increase your brand’s reach, recognition, and credibility.

The main steps of connecting with other external website platforms to get your work published include initial research, establishing contact with website editors or admins, and then developing a mutually beneficial relationship that includes great content and promotion on both sides.

Besides the creation of each post, there are a variety of other tactics that can be implemented during guest posting campaigns which can help maximize the reach of every post, resulting in more referral traffic, brand recognition and guest post opportunities.

Interlink Guest Posts

Cross-referencing your guest posts with one another (across the same website or several different ones) is a great way to promote your content and extend its reach. Besides reinforcing your point, it also gives you an opportunity to promote your work on other websites. When it comes to self-promotion, don’t see it as a bad thing. If you don’t promote yourself, then who will?

Interlinking guest posts is beneficial to readers; if they want to learn more about a certain topic that you mention in one post, provide a link to another post in which you go into greater detail about that subject. Since you’re referencing something you’ve written, you can be sure of its quality.

Interlinking your guest posts with each other will also begin to build an ecosystem of your content in which you keep your readers reading your work. Like any smart marketer, the more time you have prospects’ eyeballs on your content, the more likely you are to develop new relationships, get more website traffic, acquire leads, and make sales.

Be sure to ask the website contact their stipulations on interlinking. While most don’t mind, others may require links to their other internal pages. If this is the case, you can always consider linking to your other published posts on that publisher’s domain, if they are related.

Get a Regular Column

Having a regular series or guest post obligation on an external publisher brings many other benefits besides interlinking opportunities. Many regular columns are listed on publishers’ main pages, and highly-trafficked pages bring regular readers who begin to look forward to specific columnists’ posts. Also, chances are, websites that take regular contributors or columnists have a much larger following, as they require more regular content.

Larger credibility is another factor. Many regular contributors also get a bio page, which can bring more visibility and linking to your websites and social media profiles. Be sure to claim yourself as a contributor to that platform on Google+, which will help your published work become more visible in search results.

Repurposing Content

If you are publishing guest posts across multiple publishers, it may save you time and resources to repurpose your content and research when needed. For example, your research on an advanced article about Google Analytics features could also be repurposed for an article on how Google Analytics can help you evaluate the relevancy of your blog post content.

In addition, two different articles on the same topic can be repurposed depending on their audience. For a guest blogging opportunity about mobile apps, for instance, on a website that caters to small business owners, you could take a different slant on the same subject when writing for app developers or a technology news blog.

Another way to repurpose content is to change its format. Transforming a text-based article into a beautiful infographic, video, or slideshare presentation are a few examples of how to do this. Once repurposed into a different format, you can then reach new audiences across different publishers and platforms.

For example, creating a video around one of your best articles will allow you to reach viewers on Youtube, and creating a Powerpoint presentation will allow you to reach your target audience on SlideShare.

Content Syndication

If you have a large database of unique content, look into content syndication. Many websites will automatically syndicate your existing blog content (Business2Community does this), thus giving you more exposure without the additional effort it takes to create new content.

Searching for “industry term + syndication” or “industry term + content/blog syndication” may be able to bring automatic services which you can apply to be a part of. Just be wary of incurring a duplicate content penalty; Google sometimes fails at figuring out who the original publisher of content is, and improperly assigns attribution of that content. If this happens, your content might be flagged as duplicate, which will prevent it from showing up in search results.

If your website publishes news content frequently, you can also apply to be syndicated to Google News, which automatically pulls a snippet of your content from each post and displays it in News search results. This is useful for your own website, as well as regular sites you contribute to (if they agree to let you submit their site or you suggest it to them).

To see if a website is already syndicated by Google News, do a search for “site:YourURLHere.com” and then click on the News category. If results appear, then the site is already being syndicated.

Social Sharing

The final important way to maximize the reach and value of each guest post is to engage in social sharing. If you are attempting to get content accepted on a large platform, knowing that they promote all guest posts via a large social media following will be added incentive (research their past posting history or just ask).

In addition, it’s important to share all your written content with your own audience and customers through social media and any other regular communication channels, such as the company blog or news section or email newsletter. The first half of getting people to talk about your content is to talk about it yourself.

Finally, whether your content is getting syndicated, repurposed, regularly posted, or shared with thousands through social media, the true cornerstone of any content campaign is the quality of the posts themselves.

Without high quality posts, it will be next to impossible to get the level of visibility that makes these types of campaigns worthwhile.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

2 thoughts on “How to Get the Most Value Out of Your Guest Posting Campaigns”

Thanks for this great post. What is a little hard for a young writer is to get started. Obviously, a young guy will have very few content to cross link and small community of followers to share with. My advice would be to focus on writing to build up a stock of content.

When you have a post published as a guest on Someone Else’s site, be sure to reference them as you promote on your social sites. Mentioning them on Twitter when you Tweet out your article allows you to garner exposure from there followers. Plus the guest site may re-tweet your message on your behalf.